It was just a matter of time. The company that vows to do know evil, would eventually take over the function that is the most hated in the world. Don’t get me wrong, Google didn’t come into your organization and start giving your employees performance reviews, yet. What Google does is much more stealth.
Remember back in April of this year (2015)? Laszlo Bock, the head of HR for Google, released his book “Work Rules!” He then went on a national book tour and was famously interviewed, everywhere, telling anyone who would listen that you don’t need a college degree to work at Google. In fact, Google has found that your college GPA and transcripts to be ‘worthless’ in terms of making a quality hire.
We all kind of chuckled. Well, there goes Google, being Google again.
Let’s fast forward to today. Jobvite recently released their 2015 Recruiter Nation Survey. It’s always an interesting read, with great data and metrics, but one metric stood out, to me, above all others:
“57% of Organizations now report that GPAs are unimportant.”
Do you see what just happened?
If Jobvite would have asked organizations and recruiters in January of this year, this same question, prior to Laszlo’s announcement, how do you think this number would be different? I’m telling you the number would have been around 5% or less!
GPA are unimportant. Really?
Here’s what Google, I mean Laszlo, forgot to tell everyone about why Google can hire people who have never gone to college. THEY HIRE FREAKING GENIUSES THAT HAVE BEEN CODING IN THEIR PARENTS BASEMENTS SINCE THEY WERE 12! These kids don’t need college. College would bore them. They know more than the professors teaching them. Google gets to hire the top 1% of people, not just college grads.
You won’t get these geniuses, who don’t need to go to college. You get half-baked nitwits who need college, a good spanking, a few years to grow up and probably deep therapy. You are not Google.
Yet, here we are, and you are answering Jobvite’s survey questions and acting like your Google. Thank you Google. Thank you for setting HR back a decade. For not telling the full story, just swaying opinion by making bold statements. We now get a generation of workers who think they can just jump off their Xbox and into a job paying six figures. That’s really helpful. You’re brilliant Laszlo.
Check out Jobvite’s 2015 Recruiter Nation Survey, it’s good stuff, even the stuff that Google brainwashed you to answer.
, as an example, touts its own online store, whhich is well designed and has
an enormous audience.
Yikes, I was really paying attention until I saw typos in your article. Not sure I can take this article seriously now. And I quote “Yet, here we are and you are answering Jobvite’s survey questions and acting like your Google to.”
Tyese –
I can tell you’re new to reading my stuff! I play a game with the audience and put in grammatical errors on purpose. You win!
Tim
Enjoying the comments and the article. In response to Amy, you need the entire picture which is not the GPA and what activities they were involved in. If they were that involved, did they do all the work themselves? Do they have just book smarts and no commonsense? Did the other work to put himself through college or help pay for the college while attending?
Good example, I went to a business college then a smaller college because that was what my family could afford. There was no extracurricular activities to participate in and I worked to help pay for my college. I have a lot of commonsense and only made a 3.2 GPA. I’ve now have worked in HR for 25+ yrs and worked my way up to HR manager.
During the recession I lost my job and saw where companies did not hire me for positions because I didn’t major in HR or go to a large, big name college. In fact I got calls over people who worked in the field and just as competent as I but did not get a call, because they did not go to college.
The 3.0 student may just have as much to contribute as the one that has a high GPA and over books his life. I will take good commonsense any day over a 4.0
A PS to Tim: Thanks for pointing out the shift in attention to GPA since the Bock book. While we don’t know whether Bock triggered it, it’s an interesting correlation!
Virtually everything HR asks from job applicants is useless in determining how they will perform on the job, including GPA. HR has become so mired in “facts” that it has lost the ability to make judgements. Hence the insistence on a person’s salary history. “It’s our policy. If you don’t give it to us, we can’t consider you.” Translation: We have no idea how to judge your value ourselves, so we’re going to rely on the judgement of a company that’s losing (or has lost) you. So much for having a competitive edge in judging value.
Salary history is just one example. GPA is another.
Why is it that, when HR can ask a candidate for anything it wants, it never asks for demonstration of how the person would do the job? Sadly, the answer is easy: HR can’t judge whether a person can do engineering, programming, marketing or can clean bathrooms properly (it’s more an art and science than you’d think).
As long as HR defends the collection of old facts in recruiting, HR needs to get out of the recruiting business.
Tim,
I am not an attorney, but my answer will start like one. It depends….if you are hiring a physician, yes, I would absolutely look at their GPA and would run from a physician who went to medical school in Mexico with a 2.4 GPA. That said, if I have two recent grads who want an entry level marketing role and one has a 3.8 GPA but no extracurricular activities, and the other has a 3.5 GPA and was on a soccer scholarship & was the VP of the Marketing club, guess who I’m hiring? As with most things, you need to see the entire picture prior to making a decision.
Google is the devil for many reasons but they are absolutely correct on this one. I have 20 years in HR and would even go a step further and say that not only is GPA a useless factor in determining intelligence, work ethic and ability…I think unless your goals are to become an engineer, doctor or attorney, college is a waste of time and money. You’re talking about an institution that no longer exist to foster intelligence and the ability to think freely and independently. It’s now primarily a tool for Progressives and Liberals to fill those empty heads with grand visions of utopia and bullshit. And since when is something that’s given away (along with a massive mountain of debt) valuable? Its better compared to DeBeers…a company that has convinced the world that their product is rare and priceless…but in reality is as plentiful and easy to obtain as well…a college “education”. Loans are given to anyone with a heartbeat and are guaranteed by the federal government (which explains why universities have no restraint when it comes to increasing tuition), grants (taxpayer money) are as easy to obtain as filling out a form and attract those who love the idea of a degree in underwater basket weaving. I say unless the career chosen mandates a specific higher education, you’re better off encouraging kids to educate themselves and learning how to think like a free individual. Some of the most successful people I know are where they are BECAUSE they skipped going to college. I would rather hire someone with 4 years of real world experience, 4 years of on-the-job training, 4 years of living in the REAL world….paying taxes and living with the realization that your not as “special” as your helicopter mommy and liberal arts professor led you to believe. Now time to get back to the reality of work….someone has to pay for all of those government grants being handed out.
Tim-as always you hit the nail on the head! College experience is an important attribute of a candidates overall profile. Google, and perhaps others that have a commanding recruiting presences and very specialized needs, may find that college experience is not a key predictor of success-but for all others, it should certainly be something to be considered.